Normal and pathological development of subject–verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children

Abstract

We report a study on the spoken production of subject -verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting 'local noun'. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships. q

On the laws of attraction at cocktail parties: Babble noise influences the production of number agreement

“…However, the plural effect we observe might be the result of an increase in 'default' singular number markings -an explanation that has been proposed in earlier studies, for instance by Hemforth and Konieczny (2003) or Franck et al (2004). This argument gains indirect support by our analysis of the distribution of repetition errors in our data, that is the number of errors where subjects reproduced the sentence preamble with one or more incorrect number markings on the noun.…”

“…1 A central claim of the explanation of the plural markedness effect by Eberhard (1997) is that number marking is based on a privative or unary feature specification, and that the featureless, 'unmarked', or default number is singular. A 'default' marking or singular bias has been suggested earlier by Hemforth and Konieczny (2003) as an explanation of their results from a written sentence completion study; also see Franck et al (2004) for a similar argument based on acquisition data. Eberhard (1997) presents evidence for the psychological reality of the unary specification of number by a grammatical feature, which is in line with common linguistic accounts of number marking.…”

Agreement and movement: A syntactic analysis of attraction

“…Answering the question of whether syntactic production operates on the basis of syntactic factors requires us to adopt a theoretical framework that identifies these factors. Such research on agreement is relatively rare in experimental psycholinguistics, although some studies have started to point to the involvement of syntactic factors like the hierarchical structuring of the words (Bock & Cutting, 1992;Franck, Cronel-Ohayon, Chillier, Frauenfelder, Hamann and Rizzi, 2004;Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002;Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998, see Section 2).…”

“…That is, languages normally admitting VS order often show flexibility in the realisation of agreement in these structures as compared to the corresponding SV configurations. It is important to note that this instability does not manifest itself as a chance realization of the marked (plural) or unmarked (singular) features: in all the cases of VS disagreement, a singular verb precedes a plural subject, never the other way around (for a discussion of the psycholinguistic relevance of the notion of markedness see for example Eberhard, 1997or Franck et al, 2004 for developmental arguments).…”

The interplay of syntax and form in sentence production: A cross-linguistic study of form effects on agreement

“…Hence, feature copy is the locus of attraction effects in agreement. Experimental reports have shown that attraction depends on the position of the intervener in the hierarchical structure, not on its final, surface position (Bock & Cutting, 1992;Franck et al, 2004;Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002;Hartsuiker, Antó n-Méndez, & van Zee, 2001;Vigliocco & Nicol, 1998). Finer structural variables identified in syntactic theory like the type of intervention relation (precedence vs. c-command) and the involvement of subject movement in the specifier of AgrS were also found to modulate attraction (Franck et al, 2006).…”